Ed Whittaker, Nadia Kalara: Skin

Relics of abandoned cities. Street patterns converging and metamorphing under pools...of blood...of oil. The irrefutable presence of existence in the form of clothing pulled from beneath the rubble. These works access a condition of civilization at first from a great height and then very close as if only matter can be said to be truly present. We remember that on the other's body, we saw the patterns of fabrics burnt indelibly in the Hiroshima blast and we are reminded that skin is another form of clothing. Nadia Kalara' s canvasses, encrusted, cracked, torn, mended and again, wounded, are a testament of the event of their fabrication but at the same time the bearing of the artist's own body as a cipher of identity and place.

In Theo Angelopoulos' s film "Ulysses Gaze" there is a scene in a burned out house. A young woman scrapes with her fingers at layers of soot as if searching for evidence of her missing father. At the end of the scene, her companion, Harvey Keitel, eventually finds some old charred photographs of the missing inhabitants. In an epic gesture Keitel lets his coat fall from his body to reveal his nakedness and is given some humble farmworkers clothes which the woman has found in a box that has somehow escaped the catastrophe. This scene is reminiscent of many of the images in Nadia Kalara' s paintings in that it takes an 'epic' form. In this sense it is narration and alienation at the same time. But through a gesture of material weight, place is actualised, a presence established. It may be co-incidental that Angelopoulos is Greek but I think not. And we see also in the work of other artists of the South such as Antoni Tapies and Jannis Kounellis tha same valuation of symbolic material as both cultural memory and its inevitable loss. Nadia Kalara' s work gets its vitality and power from a tradition of aesthetic thought profoundly aware of history' s fragile presence in the earth.